1. Technical Field
Embodiments of the present inventive concept are directed to a method that can more safely use a memory device, and more particularly to a memory cell access control method that can use safely a cell hammer phenomenon by applying safe address mapping for a desired memory area.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
The increasing integration of semiconductor memory devices has results in some newly emerging effects. One such effect is a so-called row hammer phenomenon. The row hammer phenomenon is an unintended side effect in dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) in which memory cells to leak their charges and interact electrically, possibly altering the contents of nearby memory rows that were not addressed in an original memory access. This row hammer phenomenon may occur not only in a row direction but also in a column direction. Thus, in general the phenomenon may be called a cell hammer phenomenon.
Current hardware-based solutions to prevent the cell hammer phenomenon need to be supported by the processor and the memory module for their actual applications. If there is no coordination between the relevant hardware vendors, these solutions may not be applied. In addition, the solutions may cause performance degradation in hardware, and have a further effect that once the memory cell performance has been physically decreased, the original performance may not be recovered.